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Antiwar.com weighs in on the Libby charges and pending trial.

Scooter's Choice
The 'Samson defense': if Libby goes down, will he drag the GOP down with him?
by Justin Raimondo

The indefatigable Murray Waas has yet another Scooter Libby-related scoop, one that points to a developing split between the White House and Scooter's lawyers � a conflict with the potential to rock this administration to its core. In court papers filed by special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a key aspect of Libby's grand jury testimony was revealed: Libby claimed he had been authorized by unnamed "superiors" to disclose key portions of a then-still-classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to journalists in an effort to defend the administration's rush to war with Iraq. A key fact reported by Waas puts this new information in perspective:

"Beyond what was stated in the court paper, say people with firsthand knowledge of the matter, Libby also indicated what he will offer as a broad defense during his upcoming criminal trial: that Vice President Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war. Later, after the war began in 2003, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE, to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war."

Fitzgerald has a reputation for getting underlings to turn on their bosses, and going straight to the top: he did it in cleaning up corruption in Chicago, he did it in the case of Conrad Black, and now he's doing it to Cheney. The "Bulldog" is on the scent, and if I were the vice president I'd be raising money for my legal defense right about now.

Speaking of which, the Neocon Legal Defense Fund, otherwise known as the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust, has already raised in excess of $2 million, which Mel Semblor � the Florida real estate magnate heading it up � rightly describes as "a particularly excellent start." Among the crowd of right-wing Republican also-rans and failed politicos, including Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes, two names from academia stand out: Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Professor Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins. That the leading Islamophobe and opponent of Arab "medievalism" and the foremost proponent of American hegemony as the verdict of capital-H History should join hands in defense of Libby is entirely appropriate, almost poetically so. They are the theory; Libby � a lying, conniving, unscrupulous traitor � is the practice.

Libby's defense � which we might call the "German" defense � is that he was only following orders. Hey, he's saying: it was those guys in the White House who told me to break the law. Just who these "superiors" might be is not specified in the court papers, but clearly Cheney is a prime suspect, as well as Stephen J. Hadley, then deputy national security adviser, and Karl Rove. This is the second tier of Washington warlords currently under siege in this investigation.

Libby lied when he testified before the grand jury that he had heard about CIA agent Valerie Plame's sensitive work at the Agency via unsubstantiated rumors: Fitzgerald's indictment identifies Cheney, as well as other administration officials and government documents, as an early source of this information. The information then filtered down to Rove and others, who spread it far and wide.

Clearly Fitzgerald is fishing for more charges under the Espionage Act, i.e., conspiracy to divulge classified information to those who are not entitled to receive it. In ensnaring them all in this legal web, the Bulldog is methodically and relentlessly building his case against the man at the center of it all: Cheney.

Waas also indicates that Libby's defense strategy will quickly put him at odds with the most secretive administration ever. Legal correspondence between Fitzgerald and Libby's lawyers reveals that the latter are demanding all sorts of top-secret government documents, the kind that any administration is likely to fight to keep under wraps, including "more than 10 months of the President's Daily Brief" � an "eyes only" summary of essential intelligence prepared for the president and a very few of his top advisers.

Like Larry Franklin, the convicted spy who pleaded guilty in the AIPAC espionage case, Libby faces a choice: he can save himself and turn state's evidence, or he can pursue a delaying action in hopes that the trial will drag on long enough so that a presidential pardon will spare him so much as a single day of jail time. He appears to be pursuing the latter course at the moment, but the slightest indication that the president might hesitate in absolving Libby will have the defense considering other alternatives.

Franklin chose to rat on his fellow spies, longtime pro-Israel lobbyist Steve Rosen and his sidekick Keith Weissman: he wore a wire to at least one clandestine meeting, and he will get his 12-year sentence reduced considerably if he testifies to the prosecution's satisfaction at the upcoming trial. The AIPAC duo's defense strategy is essentially the same as Libby's: delay with endless discovery motions, and blame everything on your superiors.

Rosen and Weissman will claim at the trial that AIPAC officials knew and approved of their intelligence-gathering activities, and there was never any question that what they were doing � handing over vital secrets to Israeli embassy officials � was perfectly legal. It is, the defense claims, a matter of "free speech" � because "everybody does it" as a matter of course in the lobbying process. There are no secrets, in this view: everything is up for sale or trade to Washington lobbyists, including the national security of the U.S. READ THE FULL ARTICLE

I hope Cheney gets his day in criminal court, and that justice is done.
Cheney deserves what the Rosenberg's got.